Look and Listen

Biography

I’ve been writing all of my life. I used to keep a diary when I was younger, which led to me writing poems, short stories and lots of other things just to keep myself going. I only started to get good when I was around 15. I think in my case it was something I had to do to keep myself sane. Writers are by their very nature observers rather than performers. You’re not the guy who is the life and soul of the party, hogging all the attention and entertaining everyone. You’re the other guy in the corner of the room watching that guy and thinking about what his behaviour means. For me writing might just be my only means of engaging with the world around me. In the end I honestly believe that when a propensity for creative writing is truly in the DNA of someone, it’s pathological, rather than simply a hobby. It’s been as much a curse as it has been a blessing.

Inspiration

As an artist, if your work is ever to mean anything to anyone, it has to be tempered with real life experience, conveyed in an honest humane way. My views on this come back to my earlier “branding your own personality being the preferred art form of the 21st C” point. So many people fall into a trap of trying to project a certain image of themselves when they write. If you deliberately try to sound like a great writer you are never going to become one. People want their writing to be like the photos from a professional shoot – showing the story only from one angle, with good lighting, makeup and so on and then are surprised when nobody connects with it. As the great Slavoj Zizek says, “We are not the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.” I remember I was once in a bar on a Sunday evening drinking on my own and thinking – as is my way these days – and in between all of the people coming together, socialising and having fun, I spotted a man sitting at a table by himself and having a three course meal. He was very overweight and as he ate, a bead of sweat trickled down his moist forehead. He beckoned over the very pretty waitress and told her that he was ready for his next course. She smiled and said she would bring it over. As I watched him this tableau suddenly seemed unbearably tragic. Here was a man whose highlight of the week was probably sitting down to dinner by himself on a Sunday. He looked like he was struggling to do the very thing that he lived for – but although it was destroying him, he continued to do it.